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What went on in Rottingdean, East Sussex?

What was happening in Rottingdean?

In the small village of Rottingdean on the East Sussex coast where Lord Robert Boothby grew up (p.50) attending St Aubyns Prep school until 1913/14, aged 13, and to where he sometimes returned, the author of The Dust has Never Settled*, Robin Bryans became a regular visitor during the 1950s to visit Peter Harris, resident at St Dunstan’s, Ovingdean’s famous residential home for blind veterans. During the war the young Peter Harris was both blinded and completely paralysed and Bryans often used to take him for walks across the downs, describing to him the scenery as they went. Slightly down the coast, Tom Driberg had attended Lancing College where he fell under the spell of Adam Fox and his pagan verses in the hymn book, who later becomes Sub-Dean of Westminster Abbey [p.124]

*All page references/extracts from The Dust has Never Settled unless stated otherwise

St Wulfran’s Church, Ovingdean

Aged 16, Robin Bryans first went to St Wulfran’s in 1944 with Father Charlton, prebendary of Chichester Cathedral and Tom Driberg MP, then an Independent MP for Malden, Essex (later Labour MP for Barking 1959-1974 )

“Hidden in its fold of Sussex downland, St Wulfran’s inevitably attracted black magic adherents who believed that the ancient church was built on an even more ancient site of a pagan temple. At first my visit to the church with Tom Driberg and Father Charlton in 1944, I could not possibly have foreseen the reaction of Brighton Corporation to Louis Wilkinson’s reading of the Hymn of Pan at Bear Road crematoriam over the hill or that in 1980 a High Court jury would hear me described not even by Crowley’s title of the Great Beast but as The Devil himself!” [p.119-120]

Rev Thomas Frederick Charlton was not only a prebendary of Chichester Cathedral he was also a favourite of Tom Driberg’s mother and the subject of much envy for Tom, “she liked him and so did I, rather enviously: he had two virile, blond, adolescent boys living with him.’

It was Father Charlton’s idea to engage an actress friend of Enid Bagnold’s to have sex with the paralysed and blind Peter Harris at St Wulfran’s Ovingdean that Bryans helped with. As the Rector at Dallington during this time he came near to St Dunstan’s to attend the ‘Temples of Pan’ which is what Charlton referred to as a series of smuggling caves used by gay men down at Telscombe Cliff’s nudist beach.

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Harris lived at St Dunstan’s [See Blind Veterans UK on map above] and together he and Bryans would meander down the lane to take shelter in St Wulfran’s porch, doing a crossword together, while ignoring Crowley’s devotees coming into the churchyard to light candles and leave relics.

Bryans became friends with George Balcombe the organist there [p.141]

The Anglican Archdeacon to the Aegean and Canon to St Paul’s Cathedral in Malta, titled ‘Venerable’ H. John Sharp had ‘taken up’ a young Jack Macnamara when he was a boy. Aged 30, Jack had become a Captain and was killed in 1944 during WWII while still Conservative MP for Chelmsford Essex since 1935.

Captain Jack held extreme Right-wing views like Lord Evan Tredegar and Sir Francis Rose, the former lover of Ernst Rohm.

“In 1935 Captain Jack appointed Guy Burgess as his secretary whose main task seems to have been the procurement of young blond boys for the sexual gratification of both Archdeacon Sharp and Captain Macnamara. They took a large party of English schoolboys to the Nuremburg Rally, and others to the Olympic Games in Berlin. The fact-finding missions of the Anglo-German Fellowship were duly related to Geronwy Rees as wild homosexual orgies, and this he later told the spy-book authors.”

Two other people in Bryans’ circle who spent time in Rottingdean were Mary Oliver (who claimed to be the svengali Gurdjieff’s daughter) and Princess ‘Dil’ Dilkusha de Rohan (nee Wrench). Dil, as the daughter of Standard Oil’s owner, had been briefly married to Prince Carlos de Rohan in 1922, a marriage barely consummated due to her new husband’s homosexuality before Carlos had joined Hitler’s ranks early on. Dil had met the ballet dancer Catherine Devilliers (known as Katusha) in Berlin’s Wiemar republic and fallen in love.

Katusha and Dil had been able to live openly together in Berlin during the 1920s where “they knew the sexual preferences of those who ran the German armed forces, and later Dil fed those ‘scabrous details’ to Ellic Howe who organised BBC broadcasts to Hitler’s fighting forces”. [p.310, also Daily Telegraph Obituary 23 October 1999]

Dil & Katusha at their Sussex home in 1941 – The Tate

Dil de Rohan had attended nearby Rodean as a girl during WWI where her aunt Dolly had a house nearby which she later inherited and so knew the area well and was pleased to be able to return

[See below re use of Rodean during WWII – Evan Tredegar and Robin Bryans leading sailors to get drunk (and drugged) into black masses including Jack Wells who later becomes Reverend at Emmanual Church, West Hampstead where Doggett sets up his first choir]

“turned more and more to the black masses, practised in the same way as before, by Jack’s friend Evan Tredegar. In spite of being a Catholic convert for many years as well as a Papal Chamberlain, Evan liked performing his rites in ancient country churches such as St Wulfran’s at Ovingdean. This patron saint had been an early father of the church and because of its foundation in Saxon times the Church had a venerable smell of country churchyard and ancient stone and was dim with fickle light through stained glass.”

As the first CoE Archdeacon of the Aegean, the Venerable H. John Sharp was also Canon of St Paul’s Cathedral in Valletta, Malta

Guy Burgess had been recommended to Captain Jack Macnamara by Major Ball, the Director of the Conservative Party’s Research.

Anthony Blunt: His Lives by Miranda Carter

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“Others, however who knew how Father Charlton enjoyed making love to blond adolescents in country churches, did not take this view, especially after Peter paid a visit too many and coincided with the arrival of a coven of Aleister Crowley’s devotees. Was it part of Satanic worship? That question would not be asked in the High Court until Peter was dead.”

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“Driberg knew what Aleister Crowley did in Ovingdean church but Driberg’s friend, Peter Anson had much earlier in 1964 published in Bishops At Large, descriptions of the homosexual clergy in those High Churches so closely associated with the Duke of Newcastle’s family”

[It was around an ancestor of the Newcastles – William of Beckford – that Antony Blunt had spun a cult of gothically-obsessed boy-loving aesthetes that asserted homosexuality was a superior state of being, ever since his first article published in Cambridge’s Venture – see further for Lord Margadale’s family, Sir Peter Morrison’s forebears and their purchase of the estate https://bitsofbooksblog.wordpress.com/2015/03/06/blake1978/]

p.586

During 1976 over games of chess down at the local pub [Queen Victoria, Rottingdean] the police asked if Bryans had seen much of Crowley’s black mass people around Ovingdean because “more than usual black chicken feathers and blood had been seen, and the unsolved murder of Keith’s young schoolfriend was still on police record.”

When Rev Michael Butler came to visit Bryans about the police, Bryans “gave him my views about the fact that they had to cope with Father Colin Gill and with George Kinnaird’s sado-masochistic scene.”

Robin Bryans also wrote to Rev Michael Butler at Ovingdean about Father Colin Gill’s role in the sado/masochistic scenes “which previously featured in the courts and press”. There was no reply, although the police did visit Ovingdean Church to ask their own questions. Instead Rev Butler’s Bishop – the Bishop of Chichester – Eric Kemp advised Canon Ivor Walters of St Mary’s Parish Church to sue (Ivor’s daughter’s godmother was Princess Elizabeth, QEII because Ivor’s wife had worked with the Princess in the ATS during WWII) and Bryans received a High Court writ to stop him from sending copies of the letter he sent to Rev Michael Butler to anyone else. By Easter 1977 Bryans had been poisoned and was in a coma; whatever Bryans had written in the letter to Albany Trust’s Rev Michael Butler (Deputy Director of the Samaritans) Labour’s Attorney General Sam Silkin was so keen to suppress a High Court Order was placed on Bryan’s unconscious body, sending him to prison for contempt of court.

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“On 7 April 1941, the Admiralty took over the School from the War Office and Roedean became HMS Vernon, the training school for Torpedoes and Mines and for the electrical branches of the Royal Navy, and home to over 30,000 sailors.

As a result of this time, Roedean is perhaps the only girls’ school in the country to have an Old Boys’ Association.” [Rodean Old Boys’ Association ]

During the war Rodean School had been transformed into the torpedo base HMS Vernon and Lord Evan Tredagar and a 16 year old Robin Bryans had led a dozen young sailors down the hill and through the woods to Ovingdean Church. Lord Tredegar would lace the black mass communion wine with drugs. One of the young sailors was Admiralty ‘boffin’ Jack Wellman who later became the priest at Emmanual Parish Church, West Hampstead, and who wrote books on “his priestly vocation concern occultism while his 33 years as Hampstead vicar might also be described by [Bryans’] my 1944 poem to Evan, ‘in the world yet not of the world.’

For further information [blog post to come] on Lord Evan Tredegar, royal art adviser to Queen Mary of Teck as Anthony Blunt would advise her granddaughter, please see BBC: Evan Morgan of Tredegar House. Evan was also known as the ‘Black monk’ for his keen interest in Occultism and Crowley (not to mention right-wing politics & the Ernest Rohm, Rudolph Hess, Sir Francis Rose set in Germany in the early 1930s)

In July 1968 a Hampstead Heath park keeper had chanced across a strange scene. A man was being crucified on a cross by another man while a third took photographs. Joseph de Havilland was adamant to the press that he had contacted the Archbishop of Canterbury (Michael Ramsey – for whom the blackmailing Michael De Lay Noy was working as personal press officer between 1967-1970) to announce his intentions.

The Guardian 1 October 1968

The Times 15 January 1969

Spokane Daily Chronicle – Nov 18, 1968

In autumn 1968 at the same time as Joseph de Havilland was giving evidence against his crucifixion accomplices from Hampstead Heath, Lord Evan Tredegar’s former Roedean participant in the Black Mass down at St Wilfran’s Ovingdean 25 years previously, now the paranormal psychic writing Rev Jack Dover Wellman, vicar of Emmanuel Church in Hampstead was suffering from unwanted intruders. [see Spokane Daily Chronicle above]

Doreen Cordell (Albany Trust’s former counsellor) writing to Peter Righton (Parliament’s best connected paedophile) and Dr Charlotte Wolff (Albany Trustee) on 5th July 1971 had revealed that she had been working with various churches on a growing issue of concern over the course of 9 months: sexuality expressed through religious ceremonies.

During the subsequent court case, Robin Bryans revealed one of the reasons for going through the motions of a Black Mass was because it provided an easy way to drug children to abuse all at once via the Holy Communion cup. Father Colin Gill of St Martin’s, Brighton and St Magnus the Martyr, London Bridge had been the subject of burglaries and attacks of abused boys returning to desecrate the altar according to Bryans.

“Many people besides me have pointed out that gay clergy preach that boys’ bodies are temple of the Holy Ghost, but on consecrated ground they bugger those temples, sometimes drugging the boys before the sex as part of the black mass. Could the boys then be blamed for returning to the scene of their abuse in vicarages and churches in order to steal works of art to pay for their drugs? Clergy such as Father Gill offended many with his disdain for ‘jam rags’ but could hardly complain to the police if his jettisoned boyfriends afterwards put used sanitary towels on Gill’s altar.”

“Before the court was the name of a senior Lambeth Palace official who told the press that he wanted the age of sexual intercourse with children to be reduced to 7 years. I was prepared to be termed the Devil if Bishop Kemp and his clergy found it worse for a woman to have sex voluntarily and lovingly with the crippled Peter Harris in Ovingdean Church than for a religious leader such as William McGrath forcibly to bugger boys in care at Belfast’s Kincora Boys’ Home. My quarrel with Attorney General Silkin largely derived from years before when he failed to act on my advice to end the Kincora abuse” [p.482]

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“The involvement of Anglican priests and notable laity in the black mass proved useful to my case in the High Court. I could, for example, quote the supposedly-great churchman, Tom Driberg, enthusing over Aleister Crowley’s funeral, ‘He was given a proper occultist’s send-off at the municipal crematorium in Brighton; the service included the recital of his Hymn to Pan; the town council passed a resolution deploring the whole thing and saying it must never happen again.”

“High Churches associated with Adeline de la Feld’s family often became the setting for black masses and it was at Holy Trinity, Sloane Street, that her mother collapsed after unwittingly intruding on gay rites taking place there. But both those High Church founders, Alexander Beresford-Hope and his brother-in-law, Lord Sailsbury, knew perfectly well about the homosexual scandals within the Hope family.”

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Peter Churchill (Viscount of Wychwood)

Also often staying at Rottingdean was Bryans’ friend the former Chief Page to King Edward VII and founder of the Political Research Bureau for the Labour party [p.578]. His father Victor Churchill had been Page of Honour to Queen Victoria Aged 19, he and his sisters and mother had felt to Morocco from where his mother pressured him into marrying her lover Kathleen Beavan to avoid a scandal. Queen Mary of Teck’s (George V’s wife – current Queen’s grandmother) interest in spiritualist ‘entertainments’ steeply declined when Peter Churchill’s mother (Lady Verena Churchill)’s lover Kathleen Beavan started sending packets of ‘sign-writing’ to Buckingham Palace.

King Edward VIII had been temporal head of the Church of England but not of those bishops at large of the Old English Catholic Church. Although interestingly when he abdicated and married Mrs Simpson it was the Old English Catholic Church that gave the wedding ceremony in June 1937 in Touraine.

Lady Frieda Harris (1877 – 1962)

Introduced to Crowley when he is looking for a designer for his Tarot Cards and she throws herself in styling all sorts to come up with a Thelemic / Cards of Thoth pack for him – great friends from 1937 – 1947 when Crowley dies and she becomes one of his executors of his estate, attending Crowley’s funeral in Brighton which Bryans mentions above.

Enid Bagnold (1889 – 1981)

1933

A long-term and highly influential Rottingdean resident was Enid Bagnold, a playwright and author of National Velvet and friends with Cecil Beaton letting him lodge rent-free in one of her conjoined houses near St Margaret’s Church, Rottingdean. Robin Bryans’ friend Adeline de la Feld didn’t like the Cecil Beaton circle of friends not on account of their homosexuality (she was related to William Beckford Newcastle around whom Antony Blunt had built up a cult for ‘boy-lovers’ during his time at Trinity while writing on the gothic architecture of Fonthill although Adeline resented claims to superiority of intellect and ability but not to being gay per se) – but due to their right-wing views and anti-Semitism.

Sir Roderick was 43 and Enid was 31 when they tied the knot. From 1923 they lived at North End House where they brought up their children.

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Theirs was very much an open marriage with Sir Roderick writing to his wife about his affairs with much younger women, especially those also into the theosophical wanderings of Annie Besant who having once been a reforming force to be reckoned with politically before she’d become engrossed with the occult. Enid was also a fan.

Mary Lutyens (b.1908 – 1999) was 19 years old in 1927. Seven years after Enid and Roderick were married, and while Enid was producing four children, Roderick was having a fling with Mary Lutyens.

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In 1940 Sir Roderick writes Enid his wife a note on their 20th wedding anniversary – he has ‘a new little friend’, not Mary or Lois.

Enid Bagnold By Anne Sebba

Interestingly during WWII Sir Roderick was forced to resign as Chairman of Reuters over doing a financial deal with the Foreign Office enabling their approval before the appointment of any managers. Sir Roderick’s behaviour over selling out press integrity was the reason behind the establishment of Reuters (now Thomson Reuters) Trust Principles in 1941.

Enid Bagnold – Anna Sebba

One such ‘damn grandchild’ of Enid and Sir Roderick’s was Samantha Cameron’s mother!

By 1972 when Enid started fighting with the vicar of St Margaret’s Church she was aged 82 and a registered drug addict, injecting herself with morphia and regretting her enthusiasm for Hitler.

In 1975, Mary Lutyens now in her late sixties wrote a biography of the man Annie Besant’s Theosophical Society had hailed as their discovered new World Teacher in India in 1909: Krishnamurti, the motherless 13 year old son of the Theosophical Society’s Brahmin clerk who had been an official with the British colonial administration. Lutyens biography of Krishamurti revealed that three years before Charles Webster Leadbeater and Annie Besant ‘adopted’ him, Leadbeater had already been the subject of two separate allegations of abuse of teenaged boys which had necessitated him leaving the Theosophical Society, only for Besant to accept him back into the fold approximately 6 months before he ‘discovered’ Krishnamurti. By 1915, once Krishnamurti was 20 or so, Leadbeater moved to Australia where he became ordained a Bishop of the Liberal Catholic Church and was initiated into Co-Masonry by James Ingall Wedgwood, Grand Secretary of the Order of Universal CoMasonry and founder of the Liberal Catholic Church.

6 months after Bryans’ poisoning and recovery from his coma the High Court case continued

5 October 1977: Brighton’s Evening Argus ‘A bitter row that has broken the peace and quiet of Rottingdean came up in the High Court in London yesterday – for the sixth time.” By 1981 there’d been many further hearing – and the many press cuttings lay before the judge and jury.

“Fortunately for my argument in the High Court I had a tape of Churchwarden Thomas’s allegation about what Prime Minister Harold Wilson was doing in Rottingdean and another tape made by one of Wilson’s Cabinet Ministers on Thomas’s allegations.”

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So when the Church of England recently revealed they’d given Enoch Powell’s name to the police, you’ll forgive me for wondering just how detailed an investigation Dame Butler-Sloss managed into the 2011 review of the Diocese of Chichester following her earlier mostly teflon-coated review of the Cleveland Abuse scandal…

and ask whether ‘Satanism’ isn’t sometimes convenient ‘hysteria-fuelling’ short-hand to avoid calling it what Doreen Cordell, counsellor of the Albany Trust knew it to be – non-consensual BDSM abuse of children by people who like a bit of incense with their ceremony and fetishise religious (and maybe sacrilegious) rituals? Imagine the blackmail potential if Michael De La Noy had got wind of her plans for an ecumenical conference….

A former sacristan for the Knights of Malta has pleaded guilty to nine sex offences including those against boys as young as 11 he had met in the 1960s and 70s.

Vernon Quaintance, a companion of the Order of Malta, served at the Knights’ regular Mass at the chapel in St John and St Elizabeth Hospital in North London.

On Wednesday this week a court heard that Quaintance, 71, was a paedophile who also ran a pro-circumcision group. Southwark Crown Court heard he accumulated images as recently as 2011.

He was also a leader of the Gilgal Society, a group claiming to promote male circumcision and “its benefits in terms of health, sexual satisfaction and self-image.”

In 2012, he was found guilty of possessing nine hours of child pornography on video tapes. This week he pleaded guilty to five counts of indecency with a child between 1966 and 1976 and four counts of possession of indecent images. An additional count of sexual assault alleged to have taken place in 2011 on a child was left to lie on file.

Judge Anthony Leonard QC adjourned sentencing until September. He said there was a “very real likelihood” of a significant custodial sentence. Quaintance was released on conditional bail, with the requirement to have no unsupervised contact with anyone under 18.

Concerns about Quaintance’s behaviour had come to the attention of members of the Grand Priory, a senior body of knights, who were later found not to have reported the concerns to the relevant authorities. Quaintance had been banned from serving and attending the social club at St Bede’s, Clapham Park, South London.

An inquiry into the matter by Baroness (Julia) Cumberlege found that three of the knights made a catalogue of serious errors in dealing with the concerns. The three later apologised.